Tom Paine – an Englishman returned from twenty years abroad – blogs for liberty in Britain

Posts categorized "Feminism"

Sunday, December 04, 2016

In my last post I made a rash promise to address the abuse of language by the Left; the way in which they weaponise it to undermine opposition to their ideas. Most friends of Liberty are naggingly aware that it's going on and routinely irritated by it but when I started to research it, I realised it was a big, difficult subject to sum up in a blog post. If there were enough liberty-minded academics to fill a faculty, it could be that faculty's sole field of research.

Orwell exposed it beautifully in his book 1984 where the English Socialist Party (IngSoc) was introducing a new form of the English language; "Newspeak". He explained that:

...the purpose ... was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever...

For example an IngSoc member could use the word "free" to speak of a garden free of weeds, but not to speak of free expression. That outdated, bourgeois concept would constitute crimethink and therefore did not need a word.

Isn't this is precisely what the post Soviet cultural Marxist Left is now doing world wide? In Newspeak it's now called "political correctness". Why is that term Newspeak? Because to oppose it is to identify yourself as "incorrect". Your wrongness is built into the term itself.

Orwell's fictional language was being introduced by law but the Left realised that there was no need for that. The English language itself was formed, not by Parliament, but by men of letters and everyday folk in daily use. If a word or expression was useful, it caught on. So cultural Marxist academics just used their positions to introduce "useful" concepts (to them at least) into the language. Their eager students, innocent or otherwise, then took them into the wider world and most dangerously into the field of public policy. Political correctness is a pollution entering the stream of English thought from the Academy.

Orwell's Newspeak included simple things like the sinister interior ministry being named the Ministry of Love or MiniLuv, just as in real life Britain the Ministry of War became the Ministry of Defence. That's not a specifically leftist trick. Wasn't George W. Bush using the same technique when introducing one of the greatest modern assaults on Liberty; the USA Patriot Act? It's a useful tool of persuasion. We don't call a law "the imprisonment without trial act" because who would vote for that? We call it the "Prevention of Terrorism Act" even though it most likely won't do the latter, but will definitely do the former.

The Soviet era Left sneered at "bourgeois" freedoms by questioning the value of freedom or a vote to a hungry man. The post-Soviet Left has gone further. It has usurped the term "human rights" to frightening effect; proposing "rights" than can only be delivered by the use of force on others to fund them. There can only be a "right" to work, to education or to housing if there is a force powerful enough to compel others to provide them. The true test of a human right is whether a man or woman can enjoy it without compelling another – not merely to abstain from interfering with it – but to pay for it. Regular readers know my view that anything funded by force will tend to corruption.

Newspeak is alive and well in the text of a letter written by fifty academics opposing the right of Milo Yiannopolous to give a talk at his old school in Kent; a talk that was cancelled under pressure from the Ministry of Education. How much more elegant to censor by pressuring a humble headmaster than by invoking the majesty of the law. Matthew Baxter, the head of Milo's old school, said:

This decision was taken following contact from the Department For Education’s counter extremism unit, the threat of demonstrations at the school by organised groups and members of the public and our overall concerns for the security of the school site and the safety of our community.

We note that within 24 hours of advertising the event, more than 220 Langton sixth formers had, with parental consent, signed up for the event and that objection to our hosting Mr Yiannopoulus came almost entirely from people with no direct connection to the Langton.

What a wonderful confluence of career-threatening bureaucratic pressure, agitation, threats of criminal damage and academic pomposity. Who needs a law when a clear-thinking, respectable head-teacher can be so easily cowed? Just as, long ago, a thoughtful head teacher in Manchester was first demonised and then "persuaded to take early retirement" after he made politically-incorrect (but highly prescient) observations in a conservative publication.

Which brings us to the most freedom-chilling concept of political correctness; hate speech. We are free to say what we want now, as long as it does not incite hatred (as defined by the Left) against protected groups (as defined by the Left). And any crime we commit motivated by ideas that would be hate speech if expressed is a "hate crime" to be more severely punished. Fictional policeman Gene Hunt ridiculed the suggestion that a murder might be a "hate crime" by asking

What as opposed to one of those I-really-really-like-you sort of murders?

The nonsensical thinking is as easily exposed by the hateful remarks of its proponents. It's wicked to worry so much about illegal immigrants that you vote for Donald Trump, for example, but it's fine to suggest that

"... if you're voting for Trump, it's time for the urn"

Hating on haters is ok, you see. I agree. I just don't accept the Left's right to define "hate" and "hater" or to protect particular groups or ideas from being hated. Neither, dear reader, if you value your liberty, must you.

I was let off the hook I made for myself in my last post by this wonderfully detailed article from the C2C Journal in Canada concerning the cause celebre (or at least it should be celebre) of a a contemporary hero of the cause of Liberty; Canadian academic, Dr Jordan Peterson. He is currently in what is almost certainly his last month of employment at the University of Toronto because he has publicly stated that he will not use "non-binary pronouns" such as "zhe" if requested to do so. That is in breach of a proposed new law and his university's HR policy and his employer is steadily delivering the HR warnings in preparation for his dismissal.

Dear, lovable Canada, the country that no-one can be bothered to hate, has actually been breaking ground for a while on suppressing free speech. It has form on using the law to do so. Ezra Levant's epic battle with the Newspeak-named Ontario Human Rights Commission is an old story now. His astute insistence that his hearings with the grey bureaucratic minion claiming the power to censor him be videoed exposed her idiocy to the disinfectant of sunlight. That led to the specific law he fell foul of being repealed. Now the Canadian Thought Crime legislators are at it again with their obnoxious Bill C16.

Bill C-16 writes social constructionism into the fabric of the law. Social constructionism is the doctrine that all human roles are socially constructed. They’re detached from the underlying biology and from the underlying objective world. So Bill C-16 contains an assault on biology and an implicit assault on the idea of objective reality. It’s also blatant in the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies and the Ontario Human Rights Act. It says identity is nothing but subjective. So a person can be male one day and female the next, or male one hour and female the next.

I will defend to the death the rights of Leftist academics and other rascals or morons to promote such a stupid idea as social constructionism. Quite frankly, I am amused by it. To quote my only Labour Party hero, George Orwell, once more;

Some ideas are so stupid than only intellectuals believe them

Which is precisely why Michael Gove could safely observe that the people are tired of "experts". Dr Jordan goes on to say;

So with the hate speech issue – say someone’s a Holocaust denier, because that’s the standard routine – we want those people out there in the public so you can tell them why they’re historically ignorant, and why their views are unfounded and dangerous. If you drive them underground, it’s not like they stop talking to each other, they just don’t talk to anyone who disagrees with them. That’s a really bad idea and that’s what’s happening in the United States right now. Half of the country doesn’t talk to the other half. Do you know what you call people you don’t talk to? Enemies. If you stop talking to people, you either submit to them, or you go to war with them. Those are your options and those aren’t good options. It’s better to have a talk.

If you read the rest of the interview with Dr Jordan, you will know everything I would have wished to say on the subject of the left's abuse of language. He says that "we are teaching university students lies" but he understates the point. We are teaching them in lies. The social sciences faculties of the West's universities are the Spanish Inquisition of the post-Soviet Left. They are quite simply, hostile to the truth. They are the most dangerous enemies of freedom. The most saddening fact in my life is that so much of it was spent earning money to be taken from me by state violence to fund that enmity.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Woman and men are in this life together and bound by the most powerful of bonds. By which I don't mean sex. Sexual partners (and not just heterosexual ones) often move seamlessly from love through hate to damnable indifference. But that rarely happens to the love of mothers and sons, sisters and brothers or fathers and daughters. If you believe in the conspiracy theory of "the Patriarchy" you have to believe that the men in all those relationships don't give a damn about them.

For most of modern history, most institutions, religious, philosophical or legal, were built to square a cruel biological circle. To transmit her genes successfully, a woman needs to nurture her helpless child until it can itself reproduce . A man however can take the route successfully followed by the Great Khan. Sixty percent of modern Asian males carry his DNA because he impregnated and ran. Many of his offspring died but he is as near to being the father of Mankind as any alpha male has come.

If you think the likes of Genghis are no more, consider the behaviour of the modern "Big Dog" male. His wealth is largely the means to access – more and for longer into his old age – the women drawn to the protection it offers their progeny. Hello Rupert Murdoch. Hello Donald Trump. Hello Bill Clinton. Yes, I am talking to you.

Contrary to "gender studies" orthodoxy, historical religion, law and social mores were developed not to lock women into subjection but to contain the male beast so that civilisation could be built.

Technological advances gradually enabled changes in the male/female relationship. The Married Womens' Property Act of the nineteenth century. Votes for Women in the early twentieth. In living memory, birth control provided the final key to a completely changed relationship. For the most part, I don't think men are much interested in resisting that change. They want improvements in the lives of their mothers, sisters, daughters, partners and female friends. Why wouldn't they?

I admit I still encounter occasional men who have chosen "little women" to look up to them (or pretend to). But even in the dark ages of the 1970s I actively sought an intellectual equal as my partner. I could not imagine living with a woman whose intelligence I didn't respect. As it turned out, in my teenage hubris, I may have overshot. The late Mrs P was intellectually formidable and no sufferer of fools. But though our relationship was not always smooth, I still don't think that was our problem.

Before she died, in contemplating her daughters' future, Mrs P. became alarmed at the direction feminism was taking. She was all for the removal of legal, social, institutional or educational obstacles in her daughters' paths, but she feared the sexual revolution had removed more constraints on men than women. Woman had kept all their old responsibilities but were also under pressure to be "Superwomen" and "have it all". If they failed the opprobrium from their "sisters" was vicious.

She worried that a pattern was emerging where young men paired up happily with female peers pursuing their "Superwoman" goals. By the time the women were finally ready to have children, their men – as often as not – skipped off to have them with a younger woman. It seemed to her that it was men who were "having it all".

Our daughters' response to her worries was interesting. They told her they we live in a transitional time. "The old ways have gone but new ones have not emerged yet." They assured her that they were alert to the risks and would do their best to build happy lives. She needed to hear that but I hope that's not the only reason they said it.

For what it's worth, I think their analysis is essentially correct. We can't turn the clock back, even if we wanted to. They (and I) certainly don't. My concern is that the current feminist movement is not even trying to build on its achievements but rather veering off into wild conspiracy theories and ever more ludicrous radicalism.

"Female Eunuch" author Germaine Greer is banned from most British campuses, for example, because she doesn't accept that gender is a social construct to be changed at will, with or without surgery. Asking her doctor to sew floppy ears on her, she observed, would "not make her a fucking spaniel". This earthily practical observation – with which no sane person can disagree – has made her an outcast.

I want my daughters – and all modern women – to have all choices open to them that their skills, inclinations and ambitions support. I want them – all other things being equal as economists say – to earn the same for the same economic input. I want them to be able to choose paths traditionally reserved to men. But I am inclined to agree with Milo Yiannopolous that the "third wave" feminism now attacking the fabric of reality itself is a catastrophe.

Part of the problem is natural enough. Revolutionaries in politics (like entrepreneurs in business) have a different mindset to the rest of us. When the loathsome sadist Guevara achieved his revolution in Cuba, he was bored. When shooting people he deemed "enemies of the people" lost its novelty, he went off to fight another revolution and die. When Peter Tatchell won his campaign for "gay rights" he didn't settle down to enjoy his new sexual liberty with a partner. He has led a celibate life as a fanatic, constantly raising the victimhood stakes to perpetuate the "struggle" he craves.

In business we know that we need the mad, ballsy entrepreneurs to take the high risks involved in opening new businesses. But the businesses that work then need sane, risk-sensitive people to manage them. Similarly, when the revolution has been won, the revolutionaries need to move on so that sensible people can build a stable, productive and potentially happy new society. When, if ever, is that going to happen with feminism?

Monday, May 23, 2016

I don't share the general pessimism of my age group about the millennial generation. The Misses Paine are millenials. They are serious intellectuals, hard-working women who want to make a contribution to the world they live in and generally fine human beings. So are all their friends that I have had the pleasure to meet. I would go so far as to say that the millennials I know (admittedly a sample limited by my daughters' excellent taste and my former profession) are more sober, hard-working and serious than I was at their age.

In the wake of 2008, many millennials are having a much tougher time than the late Mrs Paine and I did at the beginning of our working lives. We walked, debt-free, out of university straight into employment. We earned enough to leave our parents' homes and pay our frugal way. We were able to marry at 23, rent a crappy flat for a couple of years and buy our first modest home. Neither of us were unemployed until we chose to be. We worked hard, took things seriously and struggled at times, but our lives look golden in retrospect compared to the struggles of the average millennial.

Nor do I join the Daily Mail and today The Times on reviewing this report (actually about post-millennials currently at university but I suspect reflecting similar beliefs), in fearing for them ideologically. They are not a political bloc any more than our generation was. They are socially liberal but they are also sceptical of politicians' promises to fix their economic problems. Some go so far as to criticise previous generations for having voted themselves unfunded benefits, incurring massive government debts now dumped on them. They are right. They have been screwed.

To the extent that they have scarily illiberal ideas, I think the interesting question is why? Based on my daughters' experiences at British universities, I blame lecturers of my generation. We may have won the debate in 1970s student politics about "No platform for fascists and racists" on a pure free speech argument. But then most of us on the winning side went into productive work and many of the "no platform" losers went into academia. They have indoctrinated subsequent students to the point where only 27% of them (and only 22% of women) believe that "Universities should never limit free speech".

Some of this is simple confusion about the difference between good laws and good manners. Laws should only prohibit real harms, which do not include hurt feelings. I might ban from my circle of friends someone who went off on a racist or anti-Semitic rant, but I would not call the police. Universities can make their own rules, just like me at my dinner table. But the consequences are very different because they are rather more important fora for intellectual debate.

If students are not prepared to confront the ideas they dislike in the comfort and relative safety of a university lecture hall, how are they going to deal with them in the real world? And what, whisper it softly, if some of the ideas they hate turn out to be right?

Leftists have divided society into a hierarchy of victim groups entitled to dismiss the views of their supposed oppressors. But in the tradition mocked in "Life of Brian" when the Judean Peoples Front fought the Peoples Front of Judea, they have also allowed their zealotry to divide them in frankly hilarious ways.

Feminists like Germaine Greer are now banned from campuses because of remarks like her infamous "transphobic" observation that;

Just because you lop off your penis and then wear a dress doesn't make you a ******* woman. I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a ******* cocker spaniel.

An interesting phenomenon in this context is the emergence of the "licensed dissident." The only people who can easily challenge illiberal views are those from the Left's pantheon of the oppressed who as Milo Yiannopoulos puts it, "go off the ideological reservation". Hence the importance of his "Dangerous Faggot Tour" of American campuses in which he systematically "triggers" the "spoilt brat rich kid social justice warriors" and exposes their idiocy by posting videos of their screaming on YouTube.

It's ideology pretending to be scholarship. It's propaganda pretending to be fact.

Milo is even more amusingly forthright on that topic and more seriously says in the course of the discussion;

The violence is coming not from the right but from the left and it is informed and justified in the minds of activists by this zealotry.

Yes, I see millennials behaving as absurdly as my leftist contemporaries but I also see them arguing against such absurdities with great verve and skill. I also hope that soon the effects of 2008 will be behind them so they can start to earn properly and pay more taxes. Nothing produces economic liberals faster than excessive tax. So, once again, and perhaps to my own surprise I am on the side of optimism.

Monday, October 08, 2012

I feel the need to share the linked post with you. It is dignified, funny and true. It is amusing that it should end up on one of President Obama's campaign websites in response to the usual leftist nastiness about their opponents. I wonder how long it will be allowed to remain.

I would only add that the Left's condescension to women is matched by that to every group it seeks to badge as victims. I know there is always a chance that fate will make a victim of us but I don't see any reason to waste our precious time on thie Earth by volunteering for victimhood.